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Ethnographic Rendez-vous
the dancing duet and are not merely passive followers of their male
partners’ dance routines.
From my position as a non-dancing observer, I mostly intellectually
apprehended the effect of tango on those committed to its practice.
Not only did I never experience the psychosocial and emotional effect
that the tango embrace imprints on its dancing carriers, but I actu-
ally feared those effects as potential threats that would haunt me for
as long as my research kept me on the tango floor. I had seen some of
my Argentine friends lost forever in tangomanía, spending countless
hours of precious sleep-time practicing feverish steps in shady tango
venues. Worried about losing control over my sensorial persona and
also over the social routine that excruciatingly discriminates harshly
between masters and apprentices, I decided early on to become a non-
dancing player in the tango hall. This resolution led me to bypass some
of the tango conventions. In the end, my role as a marginal presence
at the milongas not only provided me with a unique perspective from
where to examine the tango world but also vested me with a unique
aura of removed self-exclusion that opened the door to unexplored
sides of gender relationships, which will be examined next.
Unspoken Gender Rules
Typically, in the traditional tango scenery of Buenos Aires, men ask
women to dance with only a gesture or a wink, which can be easily
ignored by their prospective belles without the men’s risking the pain-
ful humiliation of an open rejection. Subtle invitations to joining the
dance involve a delicate bodily code through which tangueros read
gazes and gestures from potential partners. Women, for their part,
also stare at men and convey bodily messages inviting them to the
winking game. Things are less subtle in New York City, partially be-
cause the international democratization of gender codes is here sup-
ported by transgender dancing practices, such as the all-female tango
practices and gay tango salons. As a cosmopolitan hub where nobody
knows exactly what planet the person sitting next to them belongs
to, the New York City tango field allows many stringent Argentin-
ean rules to be broken, forgotten, ignored, and forgiven. Therefore,
